So if the day after Halloween is All Saints’ Day and the day after Christmas is Boxing Day, what’s the day after Election Day? I’ll tell you what it is this year: exactly eight (8) weeks until New Year’s Eve! That means you have exactly eight (8) weeks until it’s time again to make you annual resolutions. Perhaps you were smart and kept this year’s list fresh and pristine, ready for 1/1/2009.

(True story: about 4 years ago I was cleaning out an old box of papers, and I found a To Do list from about 5 years before that. Except for about 2 things, the items on it were identical to that current day’s list. Sad.)

Or maybe perhaps you’d like to enter the new year with a solid 8 (eight) weeks of healthy living under your (by then smaller) belt!

Think about what you will be doing 8 weeks + one day from today. Think not so much about how you’ll look but how you’ll feel--about your body, the effort you gave, and how good it will feel to start January 1st with 56 days of momentum. Instead of beginning new health-related habits that day, you’ll be able to just continue on with what you’ve already been doing since early November. Make January 1st just another Thursday that you take the best care of yourself that you can, not Day 1.

Remember that on January 1st, you’ll being saying one of two things to yourself about your goals and your progress towards them (and think about which you’d rather)--“I wish I had” or “I’m glad I did.”

Arrested Development

I overheard my mom talking recently. She’s a therapist (which I imagine will be fodder for maaany future posts) and for the last 10 years or so she’s been really big into developmental theory, or the stages of development everyone goes through spiritually, emotionally, etc. Mostly when she starts elaborating on these things, my eyes tend to glaze over and I start thinking about shoes, rearranging my furniture, or, y’know, cake, which is likely why, when I overheard her, she wasn’t actually talking to me (methinks she’s caught onto to the fact that I’m nowhere near as deep as she is). I don’t know who she was talking to, what they were talking about, or why this came up, but she said something to the effect of, “You know when you’re trying to make a decision and you’re going back and forth between what you know is the right decision and what you want-at-that-moment? When you’re saying, ‘This is going to be the best thing for me in the long run, but, oh, I just don’t want to do it!’ Well, that is an indication that you are in between two different stages of development, and you’re struggling to both progress to the next level of development and stay comfortably where you are.”

I’d love to say that this concept has stopped all less-than-stellar choices cold, but it hasn’t. What it has done is, now and then, helped me make the (shudder) mature(r) decision. Small things, really, but that’s where the big things come from. Or, to make Holly’s dad happy: from where the big things come.

Isn’t my mom smart?